Why Quentin Tarantino wants to be the next Howard Hawks

Last night Quentin Tarantino was the subject of an Alfred Dunhill Bafta Life in Pictures interview. Ben Child went along to hear the director confirm his love of on-screen violence, and discuss his hopes for a lasting cinematic legacy

Quentin Tarantino was in a fine mood last night. From the moment the film-maker leapt on stage, dapper yet scruffy in black and grey, flashing peace signs at the crowd and beaming ear-to-ear with that maniacal schoolboy grin, you knew he was in the mood to enjoy himself.

Over the course of the evening, he touched on all his films, from 1992's Reservoir Dogs through to last year's Inglourious Basterds. Here was a man who routinely suffers at the hands of the critics for what some see as glaring over-confidence: a man treating his job as one big joke. But if there was one thing that was thrown into focus last night, it was Tarantino's seriousness when it comes to his status as a film-maker.

"This is the first time people started talking about my movies as a body of work," said Tarantino of the reception to Basterds. "Suddenly, I have an oeuvre!"

"Where I'm coming from, it's all about the filmography. I want all my movies to be from the same place. I remember how I came across Howard Hawks; I saw His Girl Friday and I thought that it was the best movie I ever saw. Then I saw To Have and Have Not and didn't like it as much, but I could tell it was a Howard Hawks movie. My aim is that some kid in 50 years time has the same experience with me and my films. At the end of a director's career you don't look at just one movie - you look at all of them."

Tarantino contrasted the comfortable position he now finds himself in with his first week as a director proper – working with volatile actor Lawrence Tierney, aka Joe Cabot, on the set of Reservoir Dogs.

"Tierney was a complete lunatic by that time - he just needed to be sedated," Tarantino said. "We had decided to shoot his scenes first, so my first week of directing was talking with this fucking lunatic.

"He was personally challenging to every aspect of film-making. By the end of the week everybody on set hated Tierney - it wasn't just me. And in the last 20 minutes of the first week we had a blow out and got into a fist fight. I fired him, and the whole crew burst into applause.

"And I thought: OK, now I'm going to get fired. That's it; that's my shot at being a director, gone, after one week."

Fortunately for Tarantino, the film's one bonafide star, Harvey Keitel, intervened to dampen studio worries, and Tarantino saved his position (though Tierney went home, fired a shotgun at his nephew and wound up in prison).

Tarantino was similarly frank when questioned about the ethics of his films's gleeful attitude to bloodshed. "I'm a big fan of violence in cinema," he said. "I believe Thomas Edison invented the camera to film people beating the shit out of each other. It really affects the audience in a big way, but at the same time you know it's just a movie. What I'm about is playing the audience like an orchestra. I'm like: laugh. Stop laughing. This is horrible! Laugh!"

The director rejected over-analysis of the occasionally extreme images seen in his films. "Ultimately, if I am showing you a guy bleeding like a stuck pig, like Mr Orange in Reservoir Dogs, it's because I want you to see a guy bleeding like a stuck pig.

"Something I learnt from Elmore Leonard was [to] set up this wonderful genre situation, and then bring real life in to fuck it up. So that's what you're seeing with that scene with Mr Orange: he's been in a shoot-out and now he has his intestines hanging out."

The film-maker last night spoke at length about the fact that 50 years after a director's death, the critical perception of their work may be very different to the way it was at the height of their career. Looking back has Tarantino maintained the standard that he set with those twin, early era spitfires, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction? Which Tarantino films do you think will be feted as his best in the year 2060?